Finally got my new board wired up recently, first one with the Voluum on it, see pic at the end of this post
Underneath, there’s a Truetone CS12 powering everything and a ProStage Remote Wah that can be MIDI-controlled by the Voluum. A friend soldered the special MIDI Out cable described on Voluum manual page 39. Now, the custom made yellow box can control the Voluum with the two footswitches on the right side; while the two footswitches on the left go to the ES-5 Control In. From there, they’re assigned to control additional Voluum features. Most of the time, top left is Voluum Compressor on/off, bottom left is LFO on/off, and top/bottom right is Voluum preset up/down. Love it! Will make some videos showcasing the board and the Voluum on my YT channel soon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BH9fgCSuEM).
The board sounds great, and so does the Voluum. The combination of Voluum + ES-5 offers tons of options. Like, by combining the ES-5 mixer and the Voluum, you can get programmable control of gain and volume for any drive pedal that you put in an ES-5 loop. Or, you can assign ES-5 buttons to switch on and off the Compressor on the Voluum. Or toggle between Tremolo at 2x / 4x the speed of the ES-5 Master BPMs. Or put the Voluum in preset bypass mode, and use a bypass preset that deactivates Volume Pedal functionality, but makes the Voluum send expression control data to the Line-6 M5: Now, everytime you put the Voluum in bypass, it automatically becomes an expression pedal for the M5. Great! Also, the editor software is fantastic. Played the board on two gigs with Canadian singer-songwriter Karyn Ellis (http://karynellis.com/), sounded great, and we got lots of compliments, even on guitar sound
Now, where there is bright light, there will also be some shadow
Here’s some observations, bug reports, and ideas for future firmware updates, please excuse the long rant. (Voluum is on firmware version 1.5.01)
1. Sending MIDI expression only goes up to 126
When I set my Voluum to send MIDI expression, the MSB CC value won't go above 126. I recalibrated the pedal twice, and made sure range is set to "0 to 127" in the editor. When in 14-bit mode, maximum is MSB=126 and LSB=127. When in 7-bit mode, well, maximum is 126. This is very messy when trying to do Whammy effects with the Line6 M5; your octaves will not be in tune anymore. Do I have a faulty unit, or is this a firmware bug?
2. Receiving Effect Enable Controllers is buggy
It’s a great feature that the effect blocks of the Voluum can be enabled individually through CC controllers. This works mostly fine, but theres some quirks. First one that I encountered: When you send an effect enable CC with a ES-5 patch change, Voluum will ignore it. I recorded the patch change on Cubase; as the MIDI list editor shows, ES-5 sends bank select LSB and MSB simultaneously, then Program Change, then the CC (in my case: CC #80 at value 127, assigned to switch on the Voluum Compressor). Voluum will ignore the CC, Compressor stays disabled. Though, when I have a footswitch assigned to send CC#80=127 in the same patch, and I hit this footswitch, the Compressor will be activated. So, appearantly something goes wrong when a Program Change message is directly followed by a effect enable CC. Interestingly, this ALWAYS goes wrong with effect enable/disable CCs after PC, but NEVER with Tuner enable/disable or Bypass on/off after PC. So it cannot be a general "poor buffering of CC incoming right after PC" problem, but must be some more specific bug.
3. Receiving Effect Enable Controllers is even buggier
Second Effect Enable CC problem: Sometimes, you have to hit a “send effect enable” footswitch 3+ times until Voluum reacts. I haven’t fully understood the problem yet, but here’s an example:
Patches 111 and 112 on my ES-5 both call up Preset P00 on my Voluum; which is a basic volume pedal preset with all other Voluum sections disabled. Also, both patches 111 and 112 have the ES-5’s external footswitch #1 assigned to “enable/disable Voluum Compressor”. Now, while in patch 111, I press Ext FS #1; ES-5 sends CC80=127, Voluum Compressor becomes active. I change to patch 112; Voluum Preset P00 is reloaded, resulting in Compressor being off again. Now, when I press Ext FS #1 again, ES-5 will send CC80=127 again. Nothing happens. I press FS #1 for the 2nd time, ES5 will send CC80=0, again nothing happens. Pressing FS #1 for the 3rd time (again CC80=127), the Compressor will finally be activated. Strange, huh?
4. Leaving Preset Edit Mode
When you send a Program Change command, you want your pedals to react, right? Else, you might get into trouble on stage. Now, when Voluum is in Preset Edit Mode (maybe because you just wanted a tiny bit more tremolo depth during a song), it will ignore incoming PC messages. Maybe this was implemented with a good reason: To avoid that you unintentionally lose your recent edits. But IMHO making live performance reliable must have priority over making preset editing foolproof. In other words, incoming PC messages should always kick Voluum out of Preset Edit Mode.
Speaking of "unintentionally losing your recent edits": That’s exactly what happens when you activate the Tuner ... there, it makes no sense IMHO. Tuner on/off should NOT end Preset Edit Mode, while incoming PC should
5. A “Freeze Pedal Control” function would be great
The Voluum is not only a fantastic low-noise volume pedal, but also one of the most flexible MIDI expression pedals around. I used to have three big pedals on my boards: Volume, Line6 Expression for my M5, Wah. With the Voluum, I’m down to one. Now, it would be great to be able to toggle from a “Volume Pedal Mode” to an “Expression Pedal Mode” without the Volume jumping up to 100% from wherever the Volume Pedal was set before. There could be different approaches how to achieve this:
Suggestion A: Add a 4th bypass mode called “Freeze Bypass”. In that mode, activating Bypass will not actually bypass the Voluum; but rather, Voluum will stay on the same preset, with the last pedal controlled values before pressing Bypass – i.e., no matter whether the pedal controlled Volume and/or LFO speed and/or sent a certain CC, those values will be frozen. Instead, moving the pedal now will control a specified external CC (MIDI Channel, CC# and Range for this programmable per preset). After un-bypassing, the pedal has to cross the point where it was set before bypassing to become active again (to avoid volume jumps). So, you could set up Voluum preset 01 to be a standard volume pedal, but when bypassed, it becomes an expression pedal for the M5, while the volume stays at where you had set it before; and preset 02 to be a Tremolo with pedal controlled speed, that turns into a Timeline expression pedal with frozen Tremolo speed when bypassed.
Suggestion B: Add a “Freeze local pedal” CC controller that will make the Voluum do basically the same as with activated "Freeze Bypass" as described above.
6. More flexibility in assigning Footswitches would be great, too
Currently, there's 6 functions that you can assign to external footswitches. The built-in one can either do Bypass=>FootswitchPresetSelectMode=>Tuner, or only Bypass (when “FS Preset Select Time” is set to “off”). Suggested enhancements:
– optional “Bypass=>Tuner” mode for the built-in FS, without the FS Preset Select Mode in between (most people with a MIDI controller will never use that mode anyway)
– add enabling each of the 5 effect sections of the Voluum as functions for the external footswitches (currently only possible via MIDI)
– add had hold functionality to external footswitches. Like, kick FS1 for 1 preset up, hold FS1 to scroll up presets. Or kick FS1 to enable/disable compressor, hold FS1 for n seconds to enable/disable gate.
7. MIDI controllable volume trim would be awesome
In general, the Voluum adds a programmable volume level per preset to your setup. That’s fantastic. Now, it would be great to have a MIDI controlled volume trim independent of the other Voluum functions. Why? Say, you have a ES-5 or ES-8. You want to create patches for creative band rehearsals; i.e. patches that allow some spontaneous changes WITHIN the patch to find out what works good in a certain song, rather than unflexible presets. In such a patch, you want to assign FS A to Voluum Tremolo on/off, FS B to Voluum Compressor on/off, and FS C to a +6dB solo level boost; and you still want to use the Voluum as volume pedal. Currently, this is not possible: ES-5/ES-8 can't assign footswitches to the internal mixer level, so you cannot take the boost from there. Of course you could switch to a different Voluum preset that has the +6dB boost; but then, you would not be able to carry over the current on/off settings of Trem and Comp; also, you would need to sacrifice TWO footswitches (since currently, ES-5/ES-8 cannot toggle between two PC commands with one Footswitch). You could switch the volume control method from “pedal” to “MIDI”, but then you would lose Volume pedal functionality. You could use a workaround and utilize the LFO section as MIDI controlled boost (MIDI controlled LFO, Square Wave, 0% Duty Cycle, desired min/max dB values for Depth Hi and Lo
), but then again you would lose the Trem in this preset. Bottom line, at the moment, you cannot boost/cut the Voluum’s Volume via MIDI by n dB within one preset without losing other core functionality. (At the moment, I resorted to using the Timeline’s +/- 3dB analog boost/cut, controllable via CC#23). Would be REALLY cool to have that functionality
8. Another small bug: LFO Duo Mode and MIDI
I love the dual LFO mode; especially with two square wave LFOs, with different time subdivisions and playing with the phase setting, you can create great almost sequencer-ish choppy rhythms (Boss SL-20, anybody?) ... BTW, odd subdivisions like x1/3, x3/4, x1.333, x 1.5 would be great to sync these rhythms to MIDI Clock. Back to the bug: I can’t get the dual LFOs to work sending MIDI to separate CC#s. I’m using the editor software, starting from both LFOs set to MIDI-send off. Now, when I assign a CC# to either one of the two LFOs, Voluum will start sending LFO MIDI on that CC#; but it's already a mix of both waveforms. When I assign a CC# to the second LFO, Voluum will stop sending LFO MIDI (unless second CC# equals first CC#). It would be great if you could use this really independently; like, LFO 1 does internal tremolo, LFO 2 modulates a filter via MIDI at the same speed and waveform, but with 50% shifted phase. Of course it would be even cooler to be able to have the two LFO send on different channels, but I would already be completely happy if the Duo LFO MIDI would work as intended
9. Sending Envelope via MIDI
As already suggested in another thread, it would enhance creative MIDI use if the Voluum could send envelope data via MIDI. In the best case, with some controls (range, attack/release). And of course only if explicitely enabled, or else it would spam the MIDI chain with unnecessary data. This could be used for turning any MIDI delay into a ducking delay, or for touch wah/envelope filter functionality, and much crazier stuff.
10. MIDI SysEx
Also, already discussed in another thread: Currently, the Voluum filters all SysEx data passing through its 5 pin MIDI. It would be really cool if the next firmware update would allow SysEx to pass through
And even better, if the built in USB-to-5-pin MIDI interface could also transmit SysEx.
Thanks for reading
Sascha
. Entering to preset selection mode or tuner mode needed a long press on the foot switch, which was hard to do by accident. Thus this was already foolproof. There was no need to remove this function. Now I cannot enter to preset selection mode if the preset is edited. First I need to cancel the edits by bending over and long pressing on the Save button by hand and then I can long press on the foot switch.